The latest season of the HBO series In Treatment follows Dr. Brooke Taylor (Uzo Aduba), a therapist in Los Angeles who currently has a diverse trio of patients — home health aide Eladio (Anthony Ramos), millionaire turned white-collar criminal Colin (John Benjamin Hickey), and distrustful teenager Laila (Quintessa Swindell) — for whom she’s trying to help navigate their concerns. Current social and cultural shifts permeate all of the therapy sessions while Brooke also tries to deal with complications and demons in her own life that are proving to be quite challenging.
During a virtual junket to promote the new season, Collider got the opportunity to chat 1-on-1 with Hickey about the dream come true of working opposite Aduba, what made this similar to being in a play, the moment of panic he went through with each episode, playing such a remarkably screwed up character, how his own time in therapy reminded him of his character’s approach to it, and what a gift this entire experience was.
Collider: This seems like an unusual challenge, where you just get to have scenes of conversations between great actors.
JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY: I have had a long, wonderful career. A lot of it has been in the theater, and I’ve done quite a bit of television too. This was an extraordinary gift. Any job during the time that we’re living through is a huge gift, but this was the perfect blend of what I love so much about acting in the theater and what I love so much about acting in television. It really and truly was like getting to be in a play, starring Uzo Aduba and me. Now that is a dream come true. Each episode was 28 to 30 pages, and the first scene begins on page one and it’s over on page 30. Once the camera starts rolling, if you both know your words, you can start going and they don’t stop. They just let you do it. There was a great freedom in that. It was also an enormous amount of work to get all of those words inside my foggy old brain, but that was also a part of the joy of it.
Did you ever have a moment of panic, in doing all of that?
HICKEY: A moment of panic? They had all of the scripts written and we had conversations about whether I would read them all and know exactly what was going on, or just go week to week. We decided to go week to week because there are things that Colin believes so fully that he’s saying, that it was good that I didn’t know they were a lie. I just got to play them as the truth. We find out later that some of that stuff is just a bunch of bullsh*t. Every week, I would get the script, I would come home, and I would look at my partner and be like, “This is the one I’m not going to be able to get. They’re going to have to move the shooting schedule. They’re going to have to change it.” I’d come in and say, “Uzo, I can’t possibly,” and she was like, “Dude, what you’re doing once every eight or nine days, I’m doing in every scene.” She was super heroic, the way she was able to learn it and be so fully present and in the moment. So, when you have somebody who raises the bar that high, you complain about the fact that you’re not going to learn it, but you f*cking learn it. You go home and learn it because, if Uzo’s going to know it, you better know it.
At the same time, was it an unusual experience to have a scene partner that you knew was really going to go out of their way not to react to what you were doing, since a real therapist also wouldn’t react?
HICKEY: Uzo is the opposite of unnerving. I think I could probably speak for all of us, in that she makes all of the actors feel so remarkably comfortable and like it’s our show. She just shares the space and the energy in such a truly leading actor way. She’s unbelievably generous. But there were times where she so unnerved me, as the character. Colin, given who he is and what he thinks he knows about women, about people of color, about his political correctness, and about his sensitivity, has it all get up-ended by this person and turned absolutely on its head, and it’s because she keeps quiet a lot of the time. Not only does Colin tie his own noose, he goes to the hardware store, he buys the rope, and he brings it back. He just is a remarkably screwed up guy and he needs the perfect person. I think he thought the court was going to assign him to an idea he had that it was going to be a guy like him because therapists look like him. And then, of course, he meets the perfect person to help reveal to him just how much help he truly needs.
How do you think Colin would feel about Dr. Taylor, if he knew how wrong he was about her and if he knew that she was more messed up herself?
HICKEY: That’s one of the brilliant things in this relationship, as they’ve written it for these two people. It’s much more interesting than her being right and him being wrong. Of course, he’s wrong because of the crimes he’s committed and because of his narcissistic personality disorder and a long list of things that Colin needs some help with. He is a remarkably smart person too, which makes his toxic masculinity all the more reprehensible. He’s smart enough to find ways to push her buttons as well. He recognizes certain, I don’t want to say weaknesses because that’s too general and one-dimensional, things about her that seemed pained and he knows how to move in and hit those places. I think it’s a much more interesting challenge for her character than if she were just dealing with a straight white privileged male. There’s nothing one-dimensional or stereotypical about this guy.
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Do you feel like he’s someone that’s open to change and help and therapy, or is he someone who is just trying to figure out how to manipulate his way to the end of it?
HICKEY: Well, that depends on how much money they offer me for Season 2. No, I’m just kidding. I don’t want to give any spoilers away. In some ways, I thought back to my own relationship with my therapist. I did about 10 solid years when I was in my 30s and I remember thinking, “Well, this is what I have to do for her to like me.” They didn’t have to be white, but I was determined that I was going to find a gay man because that’s what I was and I thought he’d understand me. And I ended up with who I think was a straight woman as my therapist. It became a thing of, “Well, she’s not going to understand me, so I have to make her like me,” which is a thing we do when we start seeing a therapist. We go, “Well, as she likes me, then she won’t realize how crazy I am.” I think Colin has an idea about therapy and about what a therapist is supposed to do, and it’s completely subverted and upended by the fact that his therapist doesn’t act or look and is nothing like what he thought he was going to get. And so, to answer your question, I think that opens a door for both of them. I think you could ask Brooke the same thing. Would you ever want to see that guy again, that perfect asshole, after four or five sessions? I think you’ll be surprised by the answer, on both ends.
You talked about how you didn’t want to read the scripts ahead, but did you ever think about, even just from episode to episode, what this guy does when he’s not in therapy? Did you ever think about what an average day in the world looks like for him?
HICKEY: Yeah, I did that a lot, and it made me so sad. I think he’s a remarkably lonely guy, who’s all alone. He’s not immune to self-pity. He only has himself to thank for where he is, by the way, but I felt bad for him. I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles can be a very, very lonely place. It’s a place where the weather is so perfect all the time. It just makes you feel like you should always be doing something that’s plugged into nature in the world. I think Colin spent a lot of time by himself in his friend’s garage guest house — because that’s where he’s living now — and doesn’t have anybody to talk to. Brooke is his only friend. That’s why he talks so much. His life is remarkably solitary and, in some ways, even lonelier and sadder than it was when he was in the pen.
You’ve had a pretty long career working as an actor. At this point, what do you look for in a project? Has COVID changed what interests you? Do you look at things differently now?
HICKEY: This was a gift from the universe for me during COVID. I had COVID, back in the beginning, in March 2020. I got it pretty bad and I recovered from it, physically, very fully, I think, but I felt like I had some brain fog. I didn’t know if it was a long hauler effect, but my brain felt foggy, in a way. So, this job was this amazing gift. First of all, any job during what we’re going through is a gift, but this was a gift of, “Wow, not only do you get to go to work, which is such a blessing, but you get to challenge your brain in a way that is remarkably scary and difficult.” I think it really helped. It actually was therapeutic, in a real way, as opposed to just an emotional way. It got me out of the house.
I think the times that we live in are so scary that, of course, you’re going to do some jobs because you’ve been offered them and you need to work, but the thing now is that you want a job to scare you. You want to read something and be like, “Holy sh*t, I don’t know if I can do this.” I absolutely felt that way when I read this. And this was just the first script. I was like, “I dunno if I can play all this. I don’t know if I can learn all this.” I was so starstruck by Uzo. I was like, “Wow, I’m just going to sit on a couch and talk for 30 pages.” You hope jobs like that come along, I’ve been around long enough to say, once a decade, that make you work your butt off because you just don’t want to screw the whole thing up. On top of all of that, I got to go to work and see what Uzo was wearing. The costume design for this show was so good. I loved my clothes. It was beautifully designed and beautifully shot. You think, “It’s just a show about a therapist and a patient,” but the way they move the camera and the way they dressed everyone was hugely brilliant. Imagination was at play.
In Treatment airs on Sunday and Monday nights on HBO, and is available to stream at HBO Max.
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